FOR 12/28

‘ARS FENNICA’ WILL OPEN AT NYC’S SCANDINAVIA HOUSE

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NEW YORK CITY — In the exhibition, “Ars Fennica: Finnish Art Now,” on view January 30–April 12, Scandinavia House presents recent work by four of Finland’s most prominent and critically acclaimed artists: photographer and video artist Elina Brotherus, sculptor Markus Kahre, painter Elina Merenmies and painter Anna Tuori.

Ranging from sculpture and installation to painting and photography, the works on view provide insights into the contemporary Finnish art world.

Brotherus’s serial photographs of landscapes and figures are like a series of songs or a book of preludes, resisting the temptation to impose a narrative as each image makes the others resonate.

Kahre’s installations disorient and disrupt supposedly self-evident assumptions about the ways in which the viewer perceives himself in the world, calling into question the ability to see, feel and understand.

The symbolic, dreamlike forms in Merenmies’s ink wash works and paintings evoke trees, veins or nerve pathways and faces. Both beautiful the macabre, Tuori’s darkly warped and joyfully out-of-joint oil paintings reveal the dark side of romanticism, encompassing both agonized ecstasy and violent pleasure as they reject clarity and symmetry in favor of ambivalence and fragmentation.

The four artists were finalists for the 2007 Ars Fennica Prize, Finland’s most prestigious visual arts award, which has been awarded annually by The Henna and Pertti Niemisto Art Foundation since 1991.

Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America is at 58 Park Avenue (between 37th and 38th Streets). For information, 212-879-9779 or www.scandinaviahouse.org.